Podcasting

With this weeks release of iTunes 4.9, which sup­ports pod­cast­ing, I thought it might be a good idea to make men­tion of some of my favorites. Okay, actu­al­ly Jason J. thought it would be a good idea and I hap­pened to agree.

First of all, I should com­ment on what an unfor­tu­nate name Pod­cast­ing is, unless you’re Apple. I have men­tioned it to a num­ber of peo­ple who have respond­ed that they don’t lis­ten to pod­casts since they don’t own an iPod. Pod­casts are noth­ing more than .mp3 files which have a RSS feed such that indi­vid­u­als can sub­scribe to them. If you have any device that can lis­ten to .mp3’s, you can get pod­casts. Let’s assume that if you’re read­ing a weblog, you have such a device right in front of you. Of course, now that you can sub­scribe to these RSS feeds from with­in iTunes, life is so much sim­pler (not that using iPod­der was dif­fi­cult or any­thing). So, with­out more wast­ed bits, here are some of my favorites and why:

• Sci­Fi Chan­nel’s Sci­Fi Wire has Randy Judice read­ing you all the weeks hap­pen­ings in Sci­Fi and Fan­ta­sy movies, games, books, etc. I’ve read the wire for years, and hav­ing it read to me is nice for my dri­ve to work once a week.
• Sci­ence Fri­day — Ira Fla­tow hosts this NPR pro­gram, which is deliv­ered in pod­cast for­mat on the fol­low Mon­day. Cur­rent­ly, each seg­ment of the 2 hour show is bro­ken into dif­fer­ent pod­casts, but hope­ful­ly they will soon make use of the new pod­cast chap­ter for­mat. This show is a great dis­cus­sion of hard sci­ence and sci­ence policy.
• Engad­get — Okay, I liked it bet­ter when Philip Tor­rone host­ed the show, but the guys at Engad­get have a good show. This is a typ­i­cal for­mat of many pod­casts: sim­ply dis­cus­sion of some news items of some relat­ed inter­est. These hap­pen to be geek­ery and gad­gets. Phil Tor­rone can still be heard on the Make Mag­a­zine pod­cast, as well.
• Gar­rick Van Buren’s First Crack show has that homey feel­ing about it. He inter­views twin city locals and talks about var­i­ous issues sur­round­ing life in Minnesota. 
• The Beeb cur­rent­ly has some pod­cast tri­als, but sad­ly, the world news still isn’t in pod­cast for­mat. How James Bond will you feel hav­ing a sexy British accent­ed voice giv­ing you world­wide updates through your head­phones? You can at least get the movie reviews.

I should also note that a num­ber of NPR’s shows, such as CarTalk, are avail­able for a year’s sub­scrip­tion free at Audible.com. Also, Air Amer­i­ca has some shows, such as Al Franken’s, in pod­cast for­mat as well.

Well, that’s hon­est­ly most of the pod­casts I’ve ever lis­tened to more than once. Believe me, there are many that you would only want to lis­ten to once. How­ev­er, as more avenues of infor­ma­tion open up to the for­mat, it will be increas­ing­ly worth while to stay on top of the lat­est posts. That’s one of the rea­sons hav­ing the BBC and NPR exper­i­ment with the for­mat is so cool. Since those two sources, along with Sci­Fi Chan­nel, account for 80% of my news, I stay well informed using this.

6/30/2005 Update: Accord­ing to Chuck at Blogu­men­tary, iTunes 4.9 sup­ports vlog­ging as well. So now, I can also watch Rock­et­boom dai­ly in iTunes as well (I sure do love watch­ing that Aman­da Con­g­don). Not that using the quick­time plu­g­in for Fire­Fox was real­ly a bur­den. It is still cool, though.